All summer I had my eyes peeled for Corsican restaurants in Paris. (July was the originally-planned Corsica month, but then the spur-of-the-momenttripto Rouenhappened. Fortunately, it turns out that Fall is the best time of year for Corsican charcuterie, so I lucked out.) I spotted one on a bike ride near the Place de la République, did some research in my Pudlo guide, and decided that Balbuzard was the place to go.

Saturday night we finally went. Nick and I were joined by another couple, and the four of us walked there together after apéros chez nous. We were greeted immediately upon entering the colorful (red and yellow tiled floor, lime green and magenta velvet wallpaper winding up the stairs) café. We were seated at a table near the bar with a good view of the rest of the room, including the small Corsican épicerie (jams, honeys, and charcuterie available for purchase) in the corner. A bottle of Corsican wine was ordered – we went with the one suggested by the waiter to compliment the cured meats – and our meals chosen, and we chatted with our friends during the brief wait for our first courses.

I had chosen the avocado salad with prawn and scallops. The prawn was great, but there wasn’t enough of him. The avocados were perfectly ripe, and the salad was served with a cold tomato compote and a wedge of fresh cheese. Only the scallops disappointed. Like the rest of the salad, they were cold, and I had really been expecting freshly seared, rare-but-warm specimens. I didn’t notice much of a difference in flavor or texture between the scallop meat and the other part (roe? liver? other mysterious organs?), which I thought was odd.

Nick had the terrine de sanglier, a delicious wild boar pâté. Corsican wild boar live their days running around in the forest, eating chestnuts, and you can tell when you taste their extremely flavorful, slightly nutty meat. The terrine was served with an onion jam that really put it over the top. Table positioning made taking photos of our companions’ plates awkward, but our vegetarian friend ordered the terrine de chèvre (cheese, that is), and ate every bit.

For the main course, I opted for the figatellu. It’s a classic Corsican sausage made from the liver and heart of wild pigs.

The flavor is strong, but I really enjoy it. Served on a bed of warm lentils with an oven-dried tomato and a breath-freshening sprig of parsley, the sausage really hit the spot. I couldn’t help but feel a pang of jealousy, though, when I looked over at Nick’s plate…

Back when Swine Flu was first making the news, the French press dubbed it “grippe porcine.” I chose, mainly for my own amusement, to translate it as “pork fever,” which sounds like something much more fun to come down with.* So when Nick came home with an entire kilo of chunky ground pork from the Chinese butcher** up the street, I had to figure out what to do with the 800+ grams he didn’t use in his breakfast scramble.

We’ve been talking about breakfast sausages lately, Nick and I, and I realized that that might just be the perfect use for this hand-ground pork. So I Googled “breakfast sausage recipe” and clicked on the first result, a tasty-sounding recipe from Alton Brown. Scanning the list of ingredients, I was pleased to note that I had everything he called for – fresh sage, thyme, and rosemary (check, and from my windowbox, no less!), fresh nutmeg (I don’t use any other kind), and even some of the more oddball (for France) items like red pepper flakes and brown sugar were covered. Now, his recipe calls for grinding the pork yourself, which I’m sure would be even more awesome, but I figured the pork I had was the right texture and fat content, so I went with it. As suggested, I combined the pork and seasonings (plus some minced onion, because I felt like it) and let them sit overnight to get acquainted. I cross-referenced Brown’s recipe with Michael Ruhlman’s sausage Ratio, and the differences are minimal.

The next morning, I pulled the bowl of seasoned pork mixture (which already smelled fabulous) from the fridge and began shaping patties.

See? You can make sausage at home, too! No complicated and awkward casings necessary, just a little patience for patty-making. We fried up four of them that morning, and ate them with fried eggs and breakfast potatoes. The rest I froze and then threw into a ziplock bag for future breakfasts and bouts of pork fever.

* Now, of course, it has much more banal names: H1N1 or grippe A.
** There are no less than twelve butchers on my street. Two are Chinese, three are French, and the rest are Arab. What this means is that even with a glut of butchers, I can buy pork at less than half of them.

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One of Corsica’s largest crops is the chestnut. As such, they feature prominently in dishes both sweet (cakes, candied chestnuts) and savory (various breads, a type of “polenta”), as well as in the local liqueurs. Much of the chestnut harvest is dried and ground into flour, which has been granted a.o.c. status. Another Corsican chestnut-based treat with the privileged status is honey.

The stuff is, quite frankly, wonderful. It has a rich, nutty aroma with floral undertones, all of which carry through on the palate. I’ve been using it to sweeten my green tea, but I’m trying to come up with a recipe that will feature it more prominently. (My first meeting with chestnut honey was years ago, when I used it in an orange pâte de fruits – a sort of jelly candy – for the restaurant where I worked. It was one of my (and the chef’s) favorite flavors of jelly, so I made a lot of them, though now that I think about it, I haven’t laid so much as a taste bud on it since then. But the reunion is going well, like when you run into an old friend and discover that nothing has changed – you can still talk for hours with no awkward silences.)

I also love the artwork on the jar. The bee is dwarfed by the gigantic, hairy chestnut, and it looks as though he is going to have to battle it in order to get to the sweet flower. A battle that is well worth it, in my book.

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Last week I teased you a bit with the mention of a tarte Belle-Hélène. Of course it isn’t much of a tease if you don’t know what a tarte Belle-Hélène is. Just to get everyone up to speed, Belle-Hélène on a French menu signifies pears and chocolate, be it a simple sundae or a fancy entremet. A tarte Belle-Hélène is basically a variation on the classic pear-frangipane (almond cream) tart, with thick chocolate ganache spread over the pears on the baked tart. It is one of those great desserts that manages to be both rustic and elegant at the same time. So that’s what I wanted to make with my first batch of CSA pears.

It turned out that we had a last-minute dinner invite that weekend, and, as usual, I volunteered to bring dessert. (Nobody ever seems to mind being a dessert guinea pig.) I started with a sweet version of the whole wheat pastry crust I raved about earlier this summer. I parbaked it while poaching some pears in a mixture of white wine, water, sugar, lemon, and vanilla bean.

Prior to the pear prep, I was wishing I had a melon baller (ironic other name: Parisian scoop) for coring the pear halves. After a few days searching came up fruitless, I realized that with pears as juicy and ripe as these, I could probably get away with using my teaspoon to core them. And I was right. Yay for multitasking kitchen tools! The peeled and cored pear halves were then gently simmered for about 5 minutes, until they were completely tender. I carefully removed them to a rack to drain. (I saved the poaching liquid to use again.)

Then I set about making the filling for the tart. Traditionally, it is made with almond frangipane, but I thought that hazelnuts would be a delicious twist on the classic. So I made hazelnut cream – a straightforward ratio of equal parts butter, sugar, hazelnut meal, and egg – instead. I spread it into my baked, cooled tart shell, and sliced up the pears in order to fan them out in an attractive manner over the tart. Like so: Read the rest of this entry »

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Ye olde CSA panier has been keeping me flush in pears lately. After doing it up one weekend with a tarte Belle-Hélène (stay tuned…) I wanted something simple the next. With the weather starting to cool off, warm spices sounded like just the thing to enhance the luscious, buttery pears. And the idea of putting them in a coffee cake made me anxious for the weekend.

Trying to decide on a coffee cake recipe, I was flipping through Ratio, wondering whether coffee cake was more like muffins or poundcake, when I caught a glimpse of Beyond Nose to Tail. Remembering the rhubarb crumble cake I cooked from it last spring, I thought that recipe would be a good jumping-off point. I changed it quite a bit, from the flour (self-raising? come on, it’s not that hard to add baking powder and salt to flour) to the sugar (brown sugar and pears make each other happy) to the liquid (wanted to use crème fraîche – maybe I was out of milk, maybe I just wanted something richer, with a hint of tang) and even the scale (only two eggs in the house, plus my loaf pan is on the small side). But in the end, the cake was delicious. The texture was spot-on, with just a hint of heady spice to complement the sweet pears. Breakfast was well worth the wait.

Spiced Pear Coffee Cake

This cake is excellent with a cup of coffee, making it equally suited to breakfast and dessert. It’s great on its own for breakfast or a snack. For dessert, dress it up a little: lightly toast slices of cake and serve warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and a drizzle of caramel sauce.

Did you remember to preheat the oven? Also, butter a 23cm / 9” loaf pan and line the bottom and long sides with parchment paper. (Bonus tip: if you leave some paper hanging over the sides of the pan, it is super easy to pull out the baked cake!)

Sift together the cake flour, baking soda, and salt.

Cream the butter and sugars until fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well in between additions. The mixture may look a little broken, but don’t worry. Beat in the vanilla.

Add half of the sifted flour and give it a couple of quick stirs. Mix in the crème fraîche, then the rest of the flour, stirring just to combine.

Spread half of the cake batter (it will be fairly thick) in the bottom of the prepared loaf pan. Top with half the pears and half the streusel. Repeat.

Bake about an hour, rotating the pan halfway through to ensure even cooking. When a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, the cake is done. Cool 10 minutes in the pan, then take it out to finish cooling (you may need to loosen the non-papered ends with a knife). Serve warm or at room temperature.

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Friday afternoon, I went on a cheese hunt. It took me deep into the 20th arrondissement, to Place Gambetta. The area is full of neat regional specialty shops, and the rue des Pyrénées, in particular, is a great place to do some food shopping. Within two minutes’ walk from the bus stop, I found two excellent fromageries that carried Corsican cheeses. At the first, François Priet, I picked up a wedge of tomme Corse – a firm cheese with small holes and a gnarly-looking rind.

I’m pretty sure that kind of rind is caused by cheese mites. So I cut it off, and the cheese underneath is outstanding. It has the distinct tang of sheep’s milk (Corsica being essentially a mountain, sheep and goats are more suited to the terrain than cattle, and all Corsican cheese is made from sheep’s milk, goat’s milk, or a blend of the two) with an earthy, mushroomy, savory richness to back it up. Thank you, cheese mites!

A little further up the hill, I came to La Cave aux Fromages. This tiny, odoriferous shop has an impressive selection of Corsican and other lesser-known French cheeses. I honed in on the A Filetta, another sheep’s cheese, but completely different from the first. I was attracted to it by the fern leaf atop the pale orange washed rind, and by the way it looked like it would ooze all over if you let it come up to room temperature.

Upon unwrapping it, Nick exclaimed, “That cheese smells. Like a cab driver.” It did have a whiff of B.O. and gasoline, I suppose, but I’ve come to find many otherwise offensive smells don’t bother me when they’re coming from a cheese. When I tasted it, the first words out of my mouth were, “It tastes like it smells. But in a good way.” Definitely strong, definitely one of the more pungent cheeses I’ve had in some time. Nick was less impressed. So I probably won’t be running out to buy another half-wheel of A Filetta anytime soon, though I certainly wouldn’t turn it down. That tomme Corse, on the other hand, may just end up in the regular rotation.

After a few months of vacation, Chez Loulou’s Fête du Fromage event is back! I’m sending this post her way, so be sure to check out the International cheese roundup over there on the 15th (that’s Tuesday).

Corn showed up in the CSA panier a couple of weeks ago. I was excited and wary. Excited because yay, corn! Wary because the few ears of cob corn I’ve had in France have been unpalatably starchy. So before even tasting it I devised a plan. Corn chowder. That way I could extract the flavor from the cobs, while the chopped, cooked kernels would have less of a chance to be offensive when combined in a creamy soup with bacon and potatoes. (How do you make anything taste good? Bacon and potatoes.)

Fortunately, when I cut the corn kernels from the cob and tasted one, I was rewarded with the crisp crunch of sweet corn. Hooray! No animal feed for us tonight! I reserved the kernels for later and put the halved cobs in a pot with a little cream (okay, a lot of cream), a bay leaf, and a few sprigs of thyme harvested from my windowbox garden. I brought it up to a simmer, then covered it and lowered the heat so the cobs and herbs could really infuse the cream with their flavors.

As we all know, a good chowder always starts with bacon. Potatoes are another must-have. Keeping it simple, I rendered some lardons while dicing potatoes, then threw the potatoes on top of the bacon and tossed to coat the cubes of potato in bacon fat. I cooked them like that for a few minutes, then added a little white wine and water to cover. Salt, pepper, and 10 minutes of simmering later, the potatoes were tender and tasty. Time to strain the corned cream into the pot and add the reserved corn kernels. Back up to a simmer for another couple of minutes to heat the corn through, and dinner was good to go.

Simple, classic, and great for those first few chilly nights of the changing season.